With No Reservations

Cooper clenched his teeth around his knee-jerk instinct to mirror the acrid tone. Fighting back would accomplish absolutely nothing, he’d learned. “It’s the twenty-first century, Dad. The internet is where the numbers are.”

His father smoothed the lapels of a suit that probably cost more than the average Dallas corporate drone’s monthly salary. “We lost Baker and Mayfield.”

Cooper’s mouth turned cottony. He’d thought the two oil millionaires were in the bag. The paperwork to open their first two restaurants, though coming along slowly, was mostly complete. He’d even broken a personal rule and played golf with them the other month, for Pete’s sake.

“They’re investing in real estate instead, and they won’t be persuaded to change their minds. I tried.”

He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Yeah, well, they decide everything together.” This was bad—worse because they weren’t the only ones Cooper had lost since he’d gotten the restaurant off the ground.

“You’re off your game.”

The muscles in Cooper’s neck tightened. “Dad—”

“You’re late to work all the time.” His father ticked off the items on his meaty fingers, pacing the plush carpeting. “You’re never home, always flying from here to that restaurant.” His voice rose. “It’s not healthy—for you or the company!”

Cooper sighed, his shoulders almost shaking against the strong urge to slump.

“I mean, do you even sleep?”

He scoffed at his father as heat edged his face. “Of course I sleep.” When he wasn’t bolting out of bed to do just one more thing.

“I need to know that you’re all in, Coop.” The senior Cooper tented his hands.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Good.” He clapped Cooper on the back, walking toward his office. “Then deal with that massive pile on your desk before anything else falls through. And take care of that training today.”

Cooper watched his father leave, swallowing around the familiar itch in his throat that craved to be satisfied with a few cold Jack and Cokes. He cleared his thoughts and forced himself to relax, turning toward his own office.

It was a mess in there, half of his desk littered with coffee-ringed napkins and the other covered in tall stacks of file folders, at the top of which were the Baker and Mayfield accounts. Next on his list. Could they have been salvaged if he’d spent more time at his desk over the past few weeks? He snatched them up and let them fall in the metal wastebasket.

There. Two down, at least two days of follow-up calls to make and—he moved to check his watch, but it was sitting on his desk at the restaurant where he’d painted the interior walls early that morning. A glance at his laptop told Cooper he needed to be at the training auditorium in fifteen minutes, and he was meeting his restaurant manager after that.

He gathered a sizable pile of folders and locked his office. Even if it would be too late to call once his night at the restaurant was finished, at least he could take care of the clients who preferred to work by email. The company depended on him to recruit franchisees who would open their restaurants across the country—and to keep their business. It was a huge percentage of their annual revenue. So he’d work all night if he had to and possibly move some things around at the restaurant tomorrow.

Cooking had made him healthy again, a huge, necessary part of what had kept him away from the bottle for two years. But he owed it to his family not to let things go up in smoke. At least not again.

His father’s words circled in his mind as if they’d forgotten something. If Cooper was going to get it together at the office, ready the restaurant and actually have customers when they opened the doors, he was going to need all the help from this “computer girl” that he could get.

* * *

THE PERFECT LIGHT spilled through the kitchen window of Sloane’s condo, illuminating the crisp white plate, slate charger and teardrop vase she’d paired with a couple red-orange tulips. It shone like a spotlight on the star of the show, a juicy roasted lemon-rosemary chicken with the perfect golden-brown crust.

Not thrown together by the seat of her pants with the items in her pantry, as Cooper probably assumed. She’d scheduled the meal in her content calendar weeks ago, orchestrated so each ingredient was fresh from local farms when she cooked and photographed almost a month before each recipe’s scheduled posting date.

Sloane wasn’t even capable of operating on a whim. At least not anymore.

A tiny speck on the smooth white plate—invisible to most—caught her trained eye. She rubbed it gently with a napkin and climbed onto a chair for a look through her camera’s viewfinder.

She adjusted the ISO speed.

Who does Graham Cooper Jr. think he is?

She dialed the aperture down a few notches. Who was she kidding? She’d almost lost it in front of him.

With one tiny movement of the shading screen a camera equipment company had sent her to review, she flicked all thoughts of Graham Cooper out of her mind and returned to her position on the chair, one foot in a clean sock perched on the table for optimum angling.

Her computer interrupted the moment of perfection, beckoning her to the kitchen counter with the rhythmic ring of an incoming video chat.

Sloane scowled as she hurried to the kitchen. There was only one person who could be calling right now. “This better be important, Grace.” Sloane stuck her tongue out at her best friend to show she was joking when her freckled face appeared. Mostly joking. “I’m losing light.”

“Good morning to you, too, Meezy!” Grace lived in San Diego, two hours behind Sloane. She was still in her pajamas even though it was past nine there. She’d nicknamed Sloane Meezy based on the name of her blog, Mise en Place.

“I wanted to make sure you got my gift.” Her friend yawned, raking a hand through her fluffy red hair. “That’s a pretty valuable piece to be floating around in the possession of the postal service.”

The biggest kitchen catalog on the web, Good Cooks, had sent Grace a high-end enamel Dutch oven she already owned. So she’d taken pity on Sloane who had dropped her own brand-new one and shattered it during an unfortunate compound butter incident.

She shuddered at the memory of the slick beef short rib concoction that had covered every square foot of her kitchen. “I was going to text you after I finished my post for today. It’s gorgeous. I think the purple looks better in my kitchen anyway.”

“Good, good. Well let’s get right down to it.”

“What?”

“You and I both know I didn’t call to chat about cookware.”

Sloane sighed. Right. That. She should have known. “There’s nothing to tell, Grace. I’m working with their son to open his new restaurant. End of story.”

“Sloane, Sloane, Sloane. There’s always more to the story. How did he act? Was he decent to you? Did he have an entourage?”

“Okay, Hoda.” Sloane carried her laptop to the table and sank into the chair. She wanted to take a nap. “No, he didn’t have an entourage. He was alone. Doing his own repairs, for goodness’ sake.”

“Did he say why he’s been off the radar for so long?”

“He was in Paris. Going to culinary school.”

“From America’s party boy to chef who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Interesting.” Grace typed something into her computer. “He doesn’t sound like the monster Levi was thinking he’d be.”

The web coding and design genius they’d befriended hadn’t held back when voicing his opinions about Cooper’s character, much less his stance on whether Sloane was fit enough to work with him in the first place.

“Well, we know Levi can be a little trigger-happy with his Google searching.” Sloane laughed.

“Yes, my friend. You’re absolutely right. So, was he as good-looking in person?”

Cooper’s warm, caramel-colored eyes and his strong profile that could have been chiseled from granite appeared in hi-def in Sloane’s mind.

Quick. Play dumb. “Who, Levi?”

Grace raised her eyebrows.